What do the far left and Islamists have in common? Not a lot, you may say, but you would be wrong. Despite being ideologically at the extremes of the political spectrum, they in fact share one worrying trait.

The old rule that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" seems to be shaping the relationship between the hard left and Islamists in Britain today. By having a common foe in western capitalism, which they conveniently blame for all of the world's ills, they have developed a marriage of convenience against the odds.

Azzam Tamimi (spokesman for MAB) when asked by BBC Hardtalk's Tim Sebastian if he was prepared to blow himself up in Palestine, replied: "If I can go to Palestine and sacrifice myself I would do it. Why not?"

Now don't get me wrong – I'm all for people of different backgrounds coming together and working in harmony. But it worries me slightly when the only thing that's really binding these divergent factions is not their love for all humanity or their desire to see a totalitarian state, but their common hatred of the west which can be called "westophobia". There, I've used it, the one word that can actually sum up all the various groupings that are ideologically driven to view the west and western capitalism as "the enemy".

Westophobia can be defined as a form of prejudice against the west, and hatred of the west, its values and peoples. This form of prejudice is commonly found in the Arab world and increasingly in today's Kremlin, not to mention amongst Islamists and the hard left. Symptomatic of this prejudice is a mindset that blames world poverty, disease, internal conflicts and in some cases even natural disasters on western foreign policy or intervention.

This is not to say that any opposition to western foreign policy, including the Iraq war or silence on Israeli aggression, should be deemed westophobic – just as support for western policy should not open one up to "neocon" or "Zionist" name-calling. I am referring to those instances where the blame game takes on a nihilistic and exaggerated element, often motivated by ideological opposition to western capitalism.

In many cases such an attitude can appear to provide a political justification for violence. For example, on July 8 2005, Robert Fisk wrote an article in which he claimed: "The Spanish paid the price for their support for Bush – and Spain's subsequent retreat from Iraq proved that the Madrid bombings achieved their objectives – while the Australians were made to suffer in Bali."

He went on say: "[What] we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralised attack on London as a result of a 'war on terror' that Blair has locked us into."

What such commentators fail to understand is that terrorists inspired by al-Qaida are not reactionary; rather they are pro-active and have a homegrown agenda, one not just of defence but one of conquest, destruction and subjugation.

In Islamist thought the west is viewed as the very embodiment of evil itself, the great satan to be opposed and fought at all costs in the struggle of good versus evil. The west is presented as one great unified body whose sole purpose is to destroy Islam and humiliate Muslims. According to the former global leader of the extremist Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, the late Abdul Qadeem Zalloom: "... when the discerning and sincere people say that the British are the head of kufr [unbelief] among all the other kufr states, they mean exactly that, for they are indeed the head of kufr and they are the arch-enemies of Islam. The Muslims should indeed harbour hatred for the British and a yearning for revenge over them ..." (How the Khilafah was Destroyed, page 186).

Perhaps the greatest embodiment of this unique westophobia-inspired relationship is the Respect coalition which is an eclectic cocktail of Islamists and Leninists. This is a unique party indeed, in that it throws together secular and theocratic advocates of totalitarianism. The hard left's and the Islamists' struggle against the west is coupled with the Soviet nostalgia of the former and the latter's caliphate mythology.

Can these two groupings really work on a common agenda? Well, for a start they both promote bizarre James Bond-villianesque conspiracy theories, and a westophobic world view, but their visions of the future are quite different. For how long will they continue to tolerate each others' views? How do people who believe that homosexuals should be thrown off high buildings build coalitions with those who promote gay rights? How do people who believe in strict gender segregation and face veils work with people who support women's lib? These schisms are sometimes apparent when gay leftists get too close to conservative Islamists and they yell "Islamophobe" and "homophobe" at one another. Rarely do they concede that they bond on another phobia: westophobia.